Taycan To The Arctic Circle Road Trip 2022

[tigerbalm]

So no replacement wiper blade then?

Nope. I've jury-rigged it enough to get me home! One for the preparation list though. Bring spare wipers with you – especially when in countries that drive on the other side of the road.

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[tigerbalm]

Thank you Norway, Finland and Sweden for having us!

Just 20 hours from the autobahn!

 

[cometguy]

When there is nobody sitting on the passenger seat – the passenger display won't be active – it will either turn off or just show the Taycan logo (its a settable option).

When I am driving, I do not use the passenger display – it feels too far away – and I've enough screens in the main PCM + cockpit display.

We find the passenger display genuinely useful – for on the move route adjustments, audio/apple music selections and customising navigation display for different requirements than the driver.

We feel it really is a passenger orientated option only.

OK, thanks for that input. It's interesting that the passenger screen "feels too far away" for you as driver; I didn't feel that way in the Taycan with a passenger screen that I test-drove solo at a dealership last year. I do know that there's a way to activate the passenger screen when nobody is sitting in the passenger seat (this has been shown on other threads elsewhere).

 

[tigerbalm]

Day 16: Oslo (Norway) -> Kiel (Germany) [Non driving day]

We checkout out of our hotel at midday and drove – mostly underground in tunnels – to the Port of Oslo.

We left Oslo – on time at 14.00 – on-board the Color Fantasy for the twenty hour trip back to Kiel, Germany. Leaving a warmer Oslo, then we had when we arrived in mid February – with little evidence of snow on the ground or trees.

After a relatively smooth crossing – though not as smooth as previously – we sight Germany off the port side and pull into Kiel as scheduled at 10.00.
Today we've a long drive ahead of us as we aim to cross both Germany and Belgium for our overnight stay near Amiens in France.

The capable all-wheel-drive arctic exploration vehicle now turning into an equally capable autobahn/motorway cruiser.

 

[_Brian_]

Day 16: Oslo -> Kiel [Non driving day]

We checkout out of our hotel at midday and drove – mostly underground in tunnels – to the Port of Oslo.

We left Oslo – on time at 14.00 – on-board the Color Fantasy for the twenty hour trip back to Kiel, Germany. Leaving a warmer Oslo, then we had when we arrived in mid February – with little evidence of snow on the ground or trees.

After a relatively smooth crossing – though not as smooth as previously – we sight Germany off the port side and pull into Kiel as scheduled at 10.00.
Today we've a long drive ahead of us as we aim to cross both Germany and Belgium for our overnight stay near Amiens in France.

The capable all-wheel-drive arctic exploration vehicle now turning into an equally capable autobahn/motorway cruiser.

Where are you Tigerbalm? We haven't heard from you in several days. Everything OK?

 

[tigerbalm]

Where are you Tigerbalm? We haven't heard from you in several days. Everything OK?

All good @_Brian_! Apologies, on the tardiness on the last few days reports – putting them together now. I do strive to keep them on time, so glad the broken schedule was noticed - lol.

A combination of some long driving days – back to back – and testing positive for COVID immediately on arriving back to Dublin – threw the schedule off.

I developed some symptoms overnight on the boat from France to Ireland – and took the required isolation procedures immediately – testing positive when I got into Dublin and am now self isolating. Amazingly, my co-driver showing no symptoms and is negative. Thankfully – we are triple vaccinated for a while now – and its a relatively mild dose – with just some flu-like fatigue – being the main (and annoying) impact.

 

[tigerbalm]

Day 17: Kiel (Germany) -> Poulainville (France)

We docked into Kiel and drove off the ship right on time at 10:00. We were pulled over by German police at the border and had our driving license and EU car registration documents checked – the first time this has happened on any of our road trips. Which we found surprising – would expect it more frequently – as our Irish registered car definitely finds itself far from home. Additionally I was asked to perform an alcohol test – blowing 0.00 – again a first abroad. Road-trips and alcohol don't mix – so this was never going to be an issue for us.

We headed onto the autobahn in the direction of Hamburg – determined to make good time – on this long day's drive. When we reached Hamburg, the tunnel/autobahn was unfortunately closed – something we weren't expecting – and we got directed down onto the city streets. Being unfamiliar with the layout and geography – coupled with getting stuck in heavy weekend traffic – we lost an unbelievable 1 hour 45 minutes – navigating around the closures and finding an alternative route around the closed roads – of which there were many.

This was exasperated by a frequent and ongoing failure we've experienced in our Taycan during this roadtrip – something that will be a subject to a dedicated post later. There was nothing we could do about it – this delay was going to make a long day – a lot longer.

We relied on the Porsche Charging Planner to select IONITY stops and lengths and kept to them as much as possible. With the high speeds of the autobahn – well in excess of 200 km/h – these stops were approximately every two hours and for around 15 to 20 mins per charge.

A lovely Mamba Green with Carbon Ceramic brakes charging beside us at one stage

Battery conditioning – at these speeds plus charging planner active was just amazing. Every stop got us 250 kW at least.

As the day progresses – the IONITY stops blend into one – always reliable – always at least one station free – always fast.

Same experience across countries – this time in Belgium.

And eventually into our last charge of the day – in France – 100 km from our accomodation.

Arriving at our hotel outside – just outside Amiens – close to midnight – we pulled into their available destination charger – and began topping up our battery to 100% at 22 kW.

Today – coupled with the delays in Hamburg – were prob a little bit on the long side. We knew from our planning that it was always going to be a challenging day – and it proved so.

The days charging stats:

Location	Start SOC %	End SOC %	kWh added	Cost	Duration	Ambient Temp	Battery Temp	Charger Type	Network
Tiste, Germany	23%	73%	42.24	€13.94	0h 21m	8.0	33	DC 350 kW	IONITY
Holdorf, Germany	25%	81%	50.73	€16.74	0h 23m	7.0	32	DC 350 kW	IONITY
Dortmund, Germany	19%	92%	70.98	€23.42	0h 35m	8.0	34	DC 350 kW	IONITY
Eschweiler, Germany	52%	85%	25.78	€8.51	0h 15m	5.5	33	DC 350 kW	IONITY
Le Roeulx, Belgium	42%	78%	27.10	€8.94	0h 11m	4.5	29	DC 350 kW	IONITY
Baralle, France	18%	78%	55.83	€18.43	0h 26m	5.0	30	DC 350 kW	IONITY
Amiens, France	50%	100%	41.90	€0	2h 0m	4.0	29	AC 22 kW	Hotel

Today we did 1023 km over 12:31 hours, with an average speed of 82 km/h, consuming 28.4 kWh/100km.

 

[tigerbalm]

Day 18: Poulainville (France) -> Cherbourg (France)

Getting a full destination charge was going to make today much easier than our plan. Instead of three potential IONITY stops, we were going to be able to get away with only one – based on our real-world consumption and also knowing we'll get a charge on the ferry – so we can arrive with little to the port.

There is a steak restaurant chain in France called Hippopotamus – which I've never been to – and I believe is considered fairly average. However, the Hippo is my favourite animal and I'll try and go to any zoo that has one to see them. I've read as much as is humanly possible up on Hippos. There was a branch of Hippopotamus attached to our hotel – but unfortunately, we arrived too late last night to try it out.

We left our hotel at 10:00 – for a leisurely – compared to yesterday – drive to catch our boat back to Ireland at Cherbourg. Stopping at a new IONITY station near Caen. If this station had been open during our summer trip – all the drama we had charging near Paris could have been avoided.

For some reason, none of the stations accepted our Porsche Charging Service RFID card – never had that happen before. We got a charger started in seconds using the "Charging" app and a QR code on the charger itself.

Arriving at the port on time.

We were about an hour late boarding the ship – unsure why. We parked in what is becoming almost our "usual" spot at this stage and plugged in. At 3kW over the 18 hour crossing we should have an ideal 50 kWh added to our battery – enough to last us a few weeks of ordinary driving.

Starting to not feel 100% – but still not sure – I wore a FFP2 mask directly to our cabin with nobody around – and began to isolate.

We arrived back into Dublin at 11.30 – only 45 mins late – making up some time on the crossing.

The days charging stats:

Location	Start SOC %	End SOC %	kWh added	Cost	Duration	Ambient Temp	Battery Temp	Charger Type	Network
Giberville, France	27%	61%	52.48	€17.32	0h 24m	10.5	32	DC 350 kW	IONITY
Ferry, France	25%	88%	52.70	€15	18h 0m	13.0	30	AC 3 kW	Ferry

Today we did 394 km over 06:23 hours, with an average speed of 63 km/h, consuming 24.8 kWh/100km.

 

[tigerbalm]

That's all folks!

Thank you all for following along with us on this road trip. We both very much enjoyed it and the car proved itself to be amazing. Its chameleon like performance on the very different environments of the German autobahn and the Arctic Circle was a privilege to experience.

But the real performance was from our tyres – the Pirelli PZero Winter NF0 – we just can't believe how impressive they were. Before this trip we had never driven even 100 meters on proper snow and ice and this car and tyre combination proved to be so capable and reassuring. We are very surprised we didn't have to break out our snow chains at some stage given the conditions we experienced.

These trip reports are worthless unless they are authentic and informative. One area we had a lot of issues on this trip with the car is in terms of unreliable data connectivity. It screwed us in Hamburg on the way home – by not receiving the tunnel closure data and re-routing us around it – but it was a persistent challenge. It was such a big issue for us that we are going to document it later in the week with a dedicated post to this thread – what we experienced, how we worked around it and how it impacted us.

This trip was one of three we we did in our first year with our Taycan – these are the other two:

Western Europe Taycan road-trip report

Winter 2021 road trip to Scotland

A reminder that the first post has an index to all the day reports and that we've kept the charging log updated as we went.

On this trip we did 6652 km over 111:29 hours, with an average speed of 62 km/h, consuming 26.1 kWh/100km.

Along the way we charged our battery 44 times adding a total of 1,895 kWh at a total cost of €617.26.

Where to next? Current thinking is late summer in Slovenia and Croatia.

 

[tigerbalm]

The three images that summarise this trip for us


Countless reliable car charging

Charging Porsche Taycan at IONITY by Tigerbalm, on Flickr

Crossing the Arctic Circle

Our Porsche Taycan at the Arctic Circle Centre by Tigerbalm, on Flickr

Seeing (and capturing) the Northern Lights

Northern Lights by Tigerbalm, on Flickr

 

[_Brian_]

All good @_Brian_! Apologies, on the tardiness on the last few days reports – putting them together now. I do strive to keep them on time, so glad the broken schedule was noticed - lol.

A combination of some long driving days – back to back – and testing positive for COVID immediately on arriving back to Dublin – threw the schedule off.

I developed some symptoms overnight on the boat from France to Ireland – and took the required isolation procedures immediately – testing positive when I got into Dublin and am now self isolating. Amazingly, my co-driver showing no symptoms and is negative. Thankfully – we are triple vaccinated for a while now – and its a relatively mild dose – with just some flu-like fatigue – being the main (and annoying) impact.

Glad to hear you made it back home. Hope for a quick recovery and look forward to following along on your future adventures.

 

[timc3]

Epic journey! You have managed to see more of the length of Norway and Sweden than I have even though I have been living in both countries over the last 15 years! And you drove past not far from where I live now.

Going to have to take a similar trip one day I think.

 

[Scandinavian]

These trip reports are worthless unless they are authentic and informative. One area we had a lot of issues on this trip with the car is in terms of unreliable data connectivity. It screwed us in Hamburg on the way home – by not receiving the tunnel closure data and re-routing us around it – but it was a persistent challenge. It was such a big issue for us that we are going to document it later in the week with a dedicated post to this thread – what we experienced, how we worked around it and how it impacted us.

Great trip report as always @tigerbalm and I wish you a speedy recovery. I have enjoyed every days report immensely. I am very impressed at the performance of the Pirelli’s. I had heard that they were quite good by some Swedish tests, but to hear that in practise has been really good and comforting.

Your experience about the communications issue is very much similar to what I experienced in my trip from Nice to Stockholm. There seems to a problem with the roaming of the Taycan, which one of my Connect contacts warned me about. He said that a number of cars that drive close to country borders can get troubles. Sound like you experienced one of these. Why it then takes so long to reconnect once you drive through a country is a mystery? I hope you will log a call with Porsche Connect and get some help with this. Otherwise Porsche has to come up with a solid method of resetting the communication between the car and the Connect services.

Looking forward to your description of the issues.

 

[tigerbalm]

Frequent but random communications issue

Here is a brief video of the issue. The thing to note most here is the lack of "bluetooth or wifi" capabilities. Not that they are not connecting, that they actually don't exist when this issue raises its head.

Additionally you'll notice in the video that – even though I am in a good coverage area – there is no connection to any cellular network.




Through out this road trip we've experienced a random but frequent communications failure that has been very impactful.

What is the issue?

When the issue occurs, the car loses access or has no knowledge or connection to the following:

• Wifi
• Bluetooth
• External data connection
• Porsche car tracking service has no visibility to the car – i.e. no PVTS+ service – confirmed by Vodafone Automative to me.

What is the impact of this?

The car has none of the following:

• No hands free phone connection via bluetooth or wired
• No CarPlay via wifi or wired – therefore no Apple or Google maps fallback
• No online navigation routing or planning
• No online charge planning
• No traffic alerts or road closure rerouting
• No map updates
• No PCM apps have any data
• No app access – no ability to request pre-heating for example.

When does it happen?

It appears to happen on initial boot/start of the car in a day. It acts as if the car doesn't always wake up properly and if that happens its "doomed" to have the issue.

How often does it happen?

Across the 18 days of this trip – it happened 6 days.

Are there any workarounds?

The following does appear to "help":

• Shut down car
• Lock car
• Walk away with key fobs out of range
• Wait at least 15 minutes
• Go back to car, open it up and start it up

There is a 50/50 chance it will boot now with knowledge of the communications hardware.

The above is the only pattern I have found to work with any degree of success. No amounts of turning off and on the car, the PCM, rebooting via engineering mode, etc works.

How did it effect this road trip?

When driving in the arctic, things like charge planning and pre-heating are very important. This is a harsh environment with temperatures often under -10C. Having a reliable car is important here – especially if its an electric vehicle. We don't know this area and don't have experience of the geography we were travelling in. Mapping is very important.

On a number of days in the arctic region, we had to rely entirely on our paper map backups – which while okay and its always important to have non-digital mapping in areas like this – is still a bit annoying in a 2021 manufactured car. To try and get the communications back, we would have to leave the car and stand around out of range in sub freezing temperatures, in the hope that randomly the car would boot "better" when we walked back.

When driving through Hamburg – we were impacted by major authobahn road and tunnel closures. Unfortunately – on one of our longest days – the communications failure was happening – and we didn't have the time to stand around in the port after driving off the boat – to get it working.

This meant we didn't know about the closures and ended up stuck in really heavy traffic inside Hamburg itself. In the end, the only way we could navigate out of there was to park up on a city street, lock the car and walk away for 15 minutes. When we got back – luckily – the car booted up correctly and we were able to navigate around the road closures. Worth nothing that the PCM did know about the road closures and now that it was back receiving data – it actually did a good job of it.

Also worth remembering that when this happens we lose all I/O comms – including fallbacks like using Apple/Google maps on CarPlay.

On the day we wanted to make most motorway progress, we were flapping around walking way from our car – in a major European city – in the hopes it will realise it has some comms hardware to help us out of dire traffic congestion!

It really is very frustrating!

How long has this been happening?

I first witnessed this within first few weeks of taking ownership of the car. However, it appears to me to be getting more frequent. On our summer European road trip that also lasted 18 days – it only happened once – this time about 1/3 of the time.

Does cellular coverage have an impact?

It "feels" like parking overnight where there is no coverage – like on a ferry or underground car park – does seem to make it happen more. It also happens plenty of times when car is parked overnight in strong signal area. It is my feeling that the issue is more related to how the car boots up in the morning than any overnight lack of coverage triggering it.

Remember, this for us is about the car even "seeing" the communications hardware – never mind trying to connect to a cellular signal. When this happens, it doesn't even know it has a wifi, bluetooth or cellular hardware in the car!

Have you reported this to Porsche?

I have given detailed descriptions of this many times over my first year of ownership to my Porsche Centre in Dublin. As I write, there has been little to no engagement and certainly no solutions provided.

As car is now due for its 30,000 km service, I plan on making this a major warranty issue. The car is warrantied against manufacture defects from the factory – thats why its there! This has been a defect from the beginning.

It is the biggest sore-point for me with my ownership of this car. Everything else has been brilliant.

 

[tigerbalm]

Great trip report as always @tigerbalm and I wish you a speedy recovery. I have enjoyed every days report immensely. I am very impressed at the performance of the Pirelli’s. I had heard that they were quite good by some Swedish tests, but to hear that in practise has been really good and comforting.

Your experience about the communications issue is very much similar to what I experienced in my trip from Nice to Stockholm. There seems to a problem with the roaming of the Taycan, which one of my Connect contacts warned me about. He said that a number of cars that drive close to country borders can get troubles. Sound like you experienced one of these. Why it then takes so long to reconnect once you drive through a country is a mystery? I hope you will log a call with Porsche Connect and get some help with this. Otherwise Porsche has to come up with a solid method of resetting the communication between the car and the Connect services.

Looking forward to your description of the issues.

Thank you @Scandinavian – they really are amazing. To do what they did in the arctic and the autobahn is mind boggling.

We actually didn't have any issues with the roaming aspects – it moved over to other countries quiet well – provided it was working in the first place!

I believe that Porsche use a company called Cubic Telecom to provide the European SIM/GSM/roaming coverage – at least that is what I read somewhere. I only just found out that its an Irish company and the CTO is a former colleague – so will reach out there and see what I can find out.

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